plushlover pointed out some particularly good Disney-style fan artwork over here, including some good sketches of Brer Rabbit. ^_^

Political weblog of the day, both for its breadth and quality of writing: James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation. On a more serene note, Docudharma is well worth a look as well. One worthy quote from a front page posting:

"Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. -- Martin Luther King, Jr."

"Biblical science" versus science, in an exhilarating YouTube clip. This is how wonderful the universe is. And we've only just begun to explore.

The Mediterranean is rising. Bear in mind also that the IPCC forecasts have, over the past five years or so, been shown to err on the conservative side - that is, the actual outcomes have been subsequently measured to be greater than predicted.

Meanwhile, Nature reports that something I've pondered for a while may be in danger of occurring: a trade war between the EU and US over greenhouse gas emissions.

An enquiry is now underway into a gruesome part of the turbulent times for the Inuit between the 1950s and 1970s: "Some elders have even alleged the RCMP - either acting alone or with the federal government - deliberately murdered up to 20,000 of their sled dogs to help officials control the Inuit and speed up the process of assimilation. For centuries, sled dogs - qimmiit in Inuktitut - had been the Inuit's main source of transportation and a direct link to the land and their food supply. Some elders have tearfully told stories about travelling into a settlement to buy supplies and upon leaving a store, coming across Mounties shooting their harnessed dogs."

I don't pay a great deal of attention to the Oscars, but it struck me that there's some actual competition in the Animated Feature category this year: Ratatouille (simply excellent) and Persepolis (trailer here), the autobiographical story of a young girl growing up as the Shah's deposed to make way for the current Republic. So extraordinarily different.

Good little slideshow on copyright, public domain, and how they eternally collide in modern culture: The Pirate's Dilemma.

Encouragingly, it looks like the new mobile Penryn CPUs will offer a modest boost in battery life, on the order of 10% or so, despite somewhat improved throughput. Of course, you do pay for the tech - a 2.6GHz T9500 will run $530 in lots of 1000, while nudging the speed down to 2.5GHz drops the tag to $316 each.

As paka noticed, the Bush administration is also unhealthy for whales.

Unusually for a Mac-centric site, RoughlyDrafted took on Muni the other day. The comments are worth reading also, with a few other readers chiming in with their municipal experiences.

Via ugly_crap, the baby lamp. Perfect nightmare fuel. And if you'd like a real miniature human spud, but aren't heterosexually inclined, "the European Court of Human Rights said Tuesday that the exclusion of individuals to adopt children simply because of their sexual orientation is discriminatory and in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights."

"The ruling noted that France, like a number of other European countries, allows single people to adopt. The court also noted that there was nothing to indicate that E.B. would be an unfit parent except for France's objection on the grounds of her sexuality. 'Henceforth, France will no longer be able to refuse approval to an unmarried person on the grounds of their homosexuality,' Mecary said in a statement to the media. 'The same thing will be true for other member countries of the Council of Europe which allow adoption by unmarried people.'"

Also via Joe. My. God., a little report from Mid-Atlantic Leather, which tickled me happily. ^_^ "The list of theme parties over the weekend is long and varied, but so far I've mostly been hanging out in the lobby of the host hotel and watching the shenanigans. Yesterday's schedule featured a 'puppy play party' in the hotel bar, where a dozen men in rubber body suits and doggie masks rolled around on the carpet, sniffed each other's butts, and growled and fought over chew toys while their masters stood to one side and chatted about leash training. I love my people."

So, it appears the target for introducing Mono on the grid is Jan 31, initially on the beta grid. ^_^ To start with, the idea remains just shifting the back end to run on Mono, with the longer term goal of opening the way to other more general purpose languages than only LSL. So there won't be a great shift for now, other than the sims spending much less time processing scripts (the wiki notes the new approach runs around 70x faster), of which there can be a surprisingly large number active on a typical region.

So, as His Steveness demonstrated, the MacBook Air fits nicely into a manila envelope. But, once you've got one yourself, what kind of sleeve do you want for it? Cue the AirMail - an envelope made of upholstery vinyl, lined with fuzzy fleece. =:D

Having watered down The Golden Compass so as not to cause any fundamentalist offense, it doesn't do very good business. Funny how that happens.. as a result, the other books will not be filmed.

Oog. Not sure I'd be very content with the German dub of Doctor Who.. that voice might work for Tennant, but not Eccles.

As anyone who knows me professionally is aware, I'm quite fond of the ARM architecture (shush at the back there, pyesetz =:) - a simple, clean design, with niceties like the barrel shifter (eg add r0,r1,r4,lsl #2 is equivalent to r0 = r1 + r4<<2, with that left shift adding nothing to the timing), and almost all instructions being conditionally executed. So, I quite enjoyed reading one ARM tidbit: they (or rather, their partners) currently shift almost three billion processors a year. That's a staggering number, and that's not even including the rest of the embedded market, such as PIC, Atmel, and other microcontrollers, and PowerPC cores.

Torchwood s2e1 - not as bad as I'd feared. For me, the highlight was seeing the old Jack back; the guest star was rather wasted in the role, but their cuddling was so nice to see on the screen. ^_^ The story itself was disposable and riddled through with plot holes, but that's Chris Chibnall's style - throw lots of action in and don't worry how much sense it makes.

In an ugly development, the co-creator of DTrace, a profiling utility recently ported into OS X from Sun's open source efforts, has discovered that certain processes - tagged with the P_LNOATTACH flag - are prohibited from reporting to DTrace. One such application happens to be iTunes. This just may be associated with the fact that iTunes Store music is delivered unprotected, with the FairPlay DRM added by the user's copy of iTunes, rather than performed server-side. It's probably not too difficult to overcome, and only affects such concealed processes - ie quit them before going tracing to avoid contaminated results - but a diagnostic/debugging tool should never, ever tell anything but the entire truth.

If you saw the excellent Watch the Worlds, but wished you'd been able to visit the build before it vanished, Robbie Dingo made a sort of outtakes extra, exploring the village a little: Watch the Worlds Revisited. (And if you haven't seen it, here you go. Highly recommended. If bandwidth isn't a big matter, go for the best resolution version, as there's a lot of detail involved)

No big surprises on Apple's quarterly results, but still most pleasant - 2,319,000 Macs, 44% up on the year-ago quarter, with the bottom line of a profit of $9.6b ($1.76/diluted share), compared to year-ago results of $7.1b ($1.14).

This hare doormat's cute, but it's the dish rack that really appeals to me. ^_^

I love picking up delicious marked-down Stuff™ at the local supermarkets. Tuesday's dinner was an unusually good example - caramelised onion and goat's cheese ravioli, which I cooked in some capsaicin-laced water, plus some dolcelatte & rocket sauce, augmented with a nice pile of thick honey ham, sliced into short ribbons, mangetout, a dash of lemon juice, a good scraping of black pepper, and completely missing the chargrilled artichokes I'd originally intended, as they apparently got pushed off the stack by the thought of the ham. A creamy, lively sauce for some surprisingly tangy ravioli, plus the crunchiness of the mangetout.. yes, that worked.